The DuPont homicide: Is mental illness behind family slaying?

From afar, Ryan Peeler was an affable young man who dawdled through life.

He’d had a girlfriend for a while, and occasionally went to his grandmother’s house for dinner or out drinking with his buddies.

By EMERSON CLARRIDGE

Uticaod

By EMERSON CLARRIDGE

Posted Feb. 15, 2009 at 12:01 AM
Updated Feb 15, 2009 at 3:03 PM

By EMERSON CLARRIDGE

Posted Feb. 15, 2009 at 12:01 AM
Updated Feb 15, 2009 at 3:03 PM

From afar, Ryan Peeler was an affable young man who dawdled through life.

He’d had a girlfriend for a while, and occasionally went to his grandmother’s house for dinner or out drinking with his buddies.

Ryan drove his car fast, and drifted through a local junior college. He spent hours in his bedroom listening to music, and in his basement shooting pool.

But Rhonda DuPont knew there was another side to her son – a side that eventually led to her slaying. She knew he’d spent weeks-long stints in the psychiatric units at two area hospitals, and that he saw nonexistent holes in the walls.

She’d seen him run into the backyard in a torrent of rain and stand on top of a picnic table. As lightning and thunder rocked the air around him, she watched as he looked up and stared into the sky.

At 27, Ryan couldn’t hold a job, and didn’t do his own laundry. He didn’t even change the linens on his bed.

DuPont pleaded with her son to take the antipsychotic medication he’d been prescribed after his schizophrenia diagnosis. When he refused, she poured the liquid Risperdal into his coffee when he wasn’t looking.

Ryan could be polite – but could also be unpredictably violent. He once held DuPont, 51, on the kitchen floor at her Whitestown home and choked her.

And it was Ryan who, police say, fatally beat her at the Gallopin’ Acres motel in Westmoreland the evening of Jan. 19. As she tried to escape the attack, he dragged his dazed mother by her hair back into his room, police say, and continued to punch her.

Mental health system ‘broken’

The difficulty Ryan’s family faced getting him to seek treatment is a common challenge that confronts the parents of young people suffering from mental illness, said Ron Honberg, the director of policy and legal affairs at the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Parents, particularly of children older than 18, find they have no way to force their children into treatment unless a judge finds they are in imminent danger to themselves or others. But there is considerable debate about when involuntary commitment laws ought to be applied.

“The fact is, the mental health system is pretty broken in the entire country,” Honberg said.

Interviews with DuPont’s relatives and mental health and legal experts yield a portrait of a man who offered clear signs he was headed toward violence. In separate interviews, DuPont’s mother and fiancé provided many of the details of Ryan’s troubled past.

Both at once blame the system and themselves for failing to do more.

Victim’s mother grieves

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Nearly a month after the slaying, the grief still is unbearable for DuPont’s mother, Joyce VanAlstine. She avoids leaving her Herkimer home. More than anything, she hopes DuPont was quickly knocked out so that she didn’t feel any pain as Ryan beat her.

“We know Rhonda’s gone, but it’s just so hard to take in.”

She says she hopes Ryan doesn’t end up in prison – she wants him to be sent to a state mental facility instead. She then says she wishes she still kept a gun in her house, in case he escapes and comes after her.

Then she dismisses her worries, saying her jail escape nightmares are borne of watching too many movies. Still, she’s afraid of her grandson.

She regrets, too, that she didn’t see her daughter at Christmas.

“She wanted us up there, and we didn’t go.”

She’d bought DuPont a box of candy and a card, but didn’t have money for other gifts.

“The checks hadn’t come yet,” she says of assistance payments.

She agonizes over every word she submits to newspapers for DuPont’s obituary. She’d like people to remember DuPont as she does – without flaw. She recalls far more people at her daughter’s funeral than were actually there.

VanAlstine wanted to see her daughter one last time, but DuPont’s coffin was left closed, her face too badly beaten. DuPont would forgive Ryan, VanAlstine thinks. And that’s what she should do, too.

“She would not want me to be vindictive.”

Ryan’s father, Reid Peeler, already has collected and donated his son’s clothes to a charity, thinking they won’t be needed anymore. He has twice gone to visit Ryan at the Oneida County jail, but VanAlstine says she could not do that. She can’t imagine coming so close to the person who has wrought so much pain.

“How can I look at somebody who took my own daughter’s life?” she asks.

Reid Peeler could not be reached for comment for this story.

‘A beautiful child’

Rhonda DuPont grew up drawing pictures and playing with paper dolls outside the Creekside Court Apartments in Herkimer.

“She was always a beautiful child,” VanAlstine says. “She looked like a doll.”

After DuPont graduated from Herkimer High School, her sister Deborah introduced her to Reid Peeler, and they began to date. Soon, Peeler asked her to move with him to Denver, where he had landed a job working at a nuclear power plant. They lived together in a new house, and DuPont went to a key-punch school.

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And soon, Ryan was born.

But the marriage began to fall apart after a few years when Reid Peeler insisted that she and Ryan travel around the country with him.

She decided to pack her things and fly back to New York with Ryan. They lived for a brief time in Buffalo, and then moved to Mohawk.

Returning to New York

Ryan signed up for Little League and liked to play video games. He seemed happy, and VanAlstine held out hope that Ryan’s parents would reconcile.

After he graduated from high school, Ryan went to live with his father in West Virginia, where Reid Peeler had moved for another power plant job.

By that time, DuPont, who liked to relax in the backyard by reading by the pool and eating chocolate truffles and key lime pie, had begun a relationship with a new man – William Griffith.

Ryan returned to New York in 2002, and at first his mother was happy that he was back. But six years of dealing with Ryan’s mental illness began to strain their relationship. Once, it forced DuPont into her bathroom, where she cried after fighting with Griffith over how to handle Ryan.

Dealing with Ryan’s illness

Handling mentally ill children is never easy. Many people with schizophrenia end up homeless or in jail. Ten percent kill themselves, says Dr. Ken Duckworth, medical director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Patients often refuse to take the medication because of the profound side effects. Others don’t comply because they don’t believe they are ill, says Duckworth.

Griffith says Ryan was one of those who didn’t comply.

“He was telling her ‘I don’t want to take that medicine. I’m all right,’” Griffith recalls.

When DuPont told Ryan that she’d been adding medication to his coffee, she hoped he’d recognize how well he’d been doing and take it on his own.

Instead, Ryan exploded, and accused her of poisoning him, according to his lawyer, Frank Nebush Jr., the chief public defender in Oneida County.

The most effective schizophrenia treatment involves a system referred to in mental health circles as assertive community treatment, where a wide range of services are offered to patients around the clock, Honberg says.

Treating substance abuse problems also is an important part of this, though it’s unclear whether Ryan abused alcohol or drugs.

The experts say there is not a direct connection between schizophrenia and violence, but that in Ryan’s case, the time he spent alone holed up in a motel room after being kicked out of his mother’s house was not healthy.

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“It sounds like there were a lot of warning signs here,” Honberg says. “The worst thing you can do is let him be alone with his voices.”

Ryan’s downward spiral

Ryan racked up speeding tickets across jurisdictions throughout the region.

He once sped home after a trip to a Hannaford grocery store, rounding corners at top speed as his grandmother in the passenger seat begged him to slow down, she says.

As she washed dishes one evening after dinner, VanAlstine looked out her kitchen window to see Ryan sitting in his car, staring through the windshield. Such behavior wasn’t uncommon. Griffith says Ryan often stared into the refrigerator, past the food and shelves.

VanAlstine strongly suspects that Ryan killed a cat when he was a teenager. He was hospitalized several times at St. Elizabeth Medical Center and Faxton-St. Luke’s Healthcare.

Each time, Ryan did well after taking medication, but signed himself out and returned home.

And DuPont kept trying to talk to him.

“It was hard for her to accept. That was her only son,” Griffith says. “We tried everything to get him into the hospital, and every place we went … it was like a closed door.”

The tipping point came at 12:30 a.m. Nov. 1, 2008.

DuPont emerged from her bedroom screaming when she found Griffith and Ryan struggling in the kitchen. Griffith ran out of his house, got into his car and drove to a phone booth, where he dialed Rhonda to say her son had to leave.

Alone in Room 4

Ryan stayed in a series of motels before settling at Gallopin’ Acres in Westmoreland, a single-story strip of rooms with white siding and black shutters.

Ryan asked his neighbors for cigarettes and tried to hitch rides from passers-by on Route 5.

DuPont went to see him most evenings, skipping the 15-minute drive only when the weather was really bad. Most of the time, she’d find Ryan in bed staring at the television. It was never turned on.

But Jan. 19 was her last trip to the motel. She had brought Ryan dinner at about 6 p.m.

Shortly after arriving, Ryan had thought her feet were sucking oxygen from the room, defense attorneys have said, and the attack began.

He hitchhiked from the scene on Route 5, but was found by sheriff’s deputies about two hours later in the city of Sherrill in western Oneida County.

Ahead: Hearings, burial

Ryan has been charged with second-degree murder and is scheduled to appear in Village of Oriskany Court on Wednesday, when two psychiatrists will present reports from interviews they had with Ryan at jail.

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A judge will determine whether Ryan understands the charges he faces, and whether he can assist his attorney to prepare his defense.

If he’s found incompetent, Ryan would be sent to Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center in New Hampton, where he would likely receive medication. If his condition improves, Ryan could return to Oneida County Court to face the criminal charges.

DuPont’s mother, consumed with grief, hasn’t decided whether she’ll be in court. But she will take the short drive from her Herkimer home this spring to the cemetery where with every gust of wind, the flags clank hard against their metal poles.

DuPont will be buried then, when the ground is soft after the cold winter is over.